


The Coward's Paradox

by SherlockMalfoy



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Post-Season/Series 08, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 18:13:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11674446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SherlockMalfoy/pseuds/SherlockMalfoy
Summary: Arnold Rimmer is a coward. He has always been a coward. He will always be a coward. A coward who listens to no one and nothing but himself. But most of all...Arnold Judas Rimmer will always do whatever it takes to keep from getting himself killed (again).





	The Coward's Paradox

**Author's Note:**

> This is a drabble that takes place in an AU I am working on based on some weird dreams I had. Post series 8, Human/Nano-Rimmer has left to become the new Ace after the original Rimmer of the show returns and takes his place. Also in the "present", this is after Kochanski has "died".

Rimmer was a coward. He always had been. His adventures as Ace served to underline the point for him. But… there were a few things he never told Lister before he left that he had sorely wished he had.  
  
“Sir,” Kryten said. “Are you sure this is wise? The last time we made changes to the past using this method you regained your status as a living human only to, well sir, lose your life again. Is this a risk you are willing to undertake again?”  
  
Rimmer sighed, insomuch as a hard-light hologram could sigh. “Just load the smegging picture Kryten.”  
  
Kryten turned on the projector. Rimmer stood watching the scene play out before him. They had pulled it from Starbug’s database full of security footage, rather, what little they could get considering what was left of the poor ship. The hologram had only needed a few still shots. Really he had only needed two, but had asked Kryten to show him how to do it himself using a third image, just for practice. The third one was an empty shot of Lister’s crew quarters on Starbug from after he had left, and after Kochanski had arrived. Rimmer had watched that section of the security footage repeatedly until he found just the right moment to pull the image for processing.  
  
“I remember being so scared in that moment. Ace had told me he was going to die. He had come to find me to replace him. Did you know that prior to my turn as Ace Rimmer I was considered to be the single most unsuitable candidate for replacement duty? It’s all in the Wildfire’s records. And yet, there he was begging me to be the next link in the chain. Me, the most spineless and cowardly of all known Arnold J. Rimmers.”  
  
“Sir, if I may be forward a moment?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“You are the most spineless and cowardly of all the Rimmers, sir. And the Ace Rimmers as well. All other known Ace Rimmers have died in battle, sir, or as a result of injuries sustained in a heroic adventure saving a damsel in distress. You however came home with your blond wig tucked between your golden lamé clad legs and chose to retire rather than die an honorable death befitting your now former role as a trans-dimensional hero.”  
  
Rimmer nodded. His time as Ace had pushed him to his limits, but it also made him realize that he himself had been… well, a smeghead if he were honest. “Yes, well, that’s because it was always the plan.”  
  
“Sir?”  
  
“You didn’t honestly believe that it was Lister who convinced me to leave and be the next Ace, did you?”  
  
“Well sir-”  
  
“Kryten, the only person I have ever listened to is myself. Why on Io would that ever change? Now, don’t allow anyone to enter the room until I’m finished here.”  
  
Ignoring Kryten’s protests, Rimmer stepped into the moving photograph playing out on the projector screen. He came in right beside his past self who had been standing on a catwalk in the engine room, leaning on a railing and wallowing in self-pity and loathing.  
  
His past self, realizing he was not alone suddenly, jumped up straight in surprise, and he looked rather angry.  
  
Kryten watched as both Mr. Rimmers talked to one another, the only difference between them had been his present Mr. Rimmer was visibly older than the one belonging to the temporal photograph. The younger Rimmer slapped the older Rimmer. At which point the older Rimmer then left the photograph.  
  
“Sir?”  
  
“All according to plan Kryten. Load the next one for me.”  
  
“Sir, if you tamper too much with your own timeline-”  
  
“I know what I’m doing. Will you just trust me a moment, please.” Kryten reluctantly loaded the next image. There stood himself as Ace, right before he joined the others in the docking bay before leaving. “Thank you, Kryten.”  
  
Rimmer squared his shoulders and stepped into the photograph playing out on the wall.  
  
“You look good, Miladdo. I knew I would.”  
  
The new Ace looked up from his pacing and glared at this older looking interloper. “I thought you were done meddling,” he said. “I’ve done what you said. I’m Ace. No need to keep looking in on me with that smegging projector of yours. We really need to destroy that, you know. Get fresh fluid for photo developing. Stop all this nonsense at the source.”  
  
“I’ve got one more stop after me and then I’ll see to that. We learned the hard way when used haphazardly the results are disastrous.”  
  
Rimmer reached into his pocket and offered his past self the same thing he had been offered when faced with his future self. A small data disk. “These are the plans for what you’re going to need to do. Don’t look at it until you are in the next dimension. We can’t risk anyone else finding out now what is going to happen in the future.”  
  
“You do understand that you shouldn’t even be telling yourself.”  
  
“Well that’s a risk that unfortunately I had to take. When I was standing where you are now, I told myself the very same thing. And here we are. But there are certain events that have to take place, without me there to cock it all up. Right now, in this moment, our universe is unstable. The Time Drive incident didn’t go the way it was meant to, and if we are around when… well, there’s this concept I’ve been calling the Lister Paradox for lack of a better term, and it cannot be resolved if I am at all present in this dimension. This safely removes me from the situation and allows me to be the only Ace to ever retire, still alive-”  
  
“In as much as a hologram can be alive.”  
  
Rimmer nodded as his past self, Ace, took the disk and tucked it into his flight jacket. “So what’s on this disk that’s so important?”  
  
“Every Ace has a core motivation and personal mission. The reason we become Ace in the first place. I know that you’ve let Lister believe he talked you into this. But lets face it, I’m the most cowardly, selfish, egotistical and self-important-”  
  
“You aren’t exactly encouraging me to continue on with this charade.”  
  
“You’re right. But… I never would have taken it up if I was not already assured I would survive finding my replacement. Yet, here I am, clearly on the Red Dwarf, in the proper dimension to access the mutated photo development fluid. Talking to myself. On that disk is the key to our survival. There is a subroutine that will install into the Wildfire when you play the disk. After a set amount of time it will start dosing your algorithm with a mild holo version of the Luck virus at specific intervals. We have a version of Legion reverse engineer it for us. It’s the only way all the pieces will come together to gather the parts we need to circumvent the Wildfire’s dimension lock and come back home.”  
  
“And what reason do I have to believe you? What could I possibly-”  
  
“When you load the disk, you’ll understand. I want to tell you more, but unfortunately this is the point when Kryten’s going to step in, ask me what is taking so long, and proceed to tell me that Listy’s out of lager again and that he has ironing he needs to complete before we reach the asteroid field.”  
  
Ace Rimmer opened his mouth, but as if on cue Kryten seemed to step out of thin air. “Mr. Rimmer, sir, what is taking you so long-”  
  
“See, what did I tell you,” he said as Kryten just continued on with what he had to say.  
  
Rimmer and Kryten left the photograph.  
  
“Wordy, self-important blowhard,” the newly minted Ace had muttered to their backs.  
  
After stepping out of the photograph, Kryten turned off the projector. “Sir, we really must-”  
  
“Go on then, get your ironing done.”  
  
“But Mr. Rimmer sir, giving your past self an item from the future is very dangerous. The last time we attempted anything like it Mr. Lister had removed two of us from existence entirely.”  
  
Rimmer rolled his eyes and gave an exaggerated simulated sigh. “Look, I had to do it because it had already happened to me, Kryten. If I didn’t do it then the paradox would not resolve itself. Time and space would collapse as all causality is undone. Do you want to be responsible for completely unraveling the universe? Hmm? Well?” At his words, combined with his accusatory tone, Kryten became visibly worried. He clapped Kryten on the shoulder. “Go on, polygon head. Go help Listy find more lager. I promise I won’t do anything to upset the timeline, and will properly dispose of the equipment and the fluid. The very next derelict we raid for supplies I will personally search out a new supply so you may continue to develop your photos.”  
  
It took a bit more prodding but eventually he finally got rid of the mother hen mechanoid. Once he was absolutely sure he had been alone, he locked the door and started the projector back up then inserted the third and final image. The empty quarters. He had taken the image at just the right moment from the footage. Right at the very end of the segment he had pulled it from, Lister had come into view and crashed onto his bed. Lister from around eight years back. More or less. This part wasn’t necessary to maintain the timeline. It had no bearing on anything, really. He just felt… well… he wanted to give his friend some hope. It wasn’t like Lister to be so hopeless. So pessimistic. But he couldn’t just appear out of thin air to him.  
  
He waited until the right moment, then stepped into the photograph. Lister’s snores were a clear indication that he’d passed out on his bunk. One whiff told him the telltale signs of a beer binge and curry. He prodded the sleeping man with a finger. No response. He had read somewhere over the years that sometimes people can hear you in their sleep.  
  
So he sat down on the edge of the bunk, and he talked. Nothing too special, really. Just… talked. He joked about saving a princess who seems to get kidnapped in literally every dimension he had gone to. He bragged about all the sex, even though only about half of it were true. He admitted that he really didn’t like Kochanski all that much and never had. Mainly because after she’d broken up with Lister he was so bloody miserable all the time it actually made him worse at his job, if that were even possible. He frowned, admitting that she was, in all likelihood, a much better shipmate than him at the time. Certainly much better versed in astro navigation despite all of his study time and revision. But he’d gotten better since becoming Ace. He didn’t have to work so hard to make Lister so miserable, which had been his only way to keep Lister sane. When he was Ace, he could loosen up a bit. It was, after all, part of the job description.  
  
He lapsed into silence for a few moments, half hoping that Lister would wake and see him there, older and more experienced now. Clearly not gallivanting around as the hot-shot golden flight boy he’d left as. But here, back home where he belonged. But it couldn’t happen, he knew. These moments, they were to give himself comfort, and hopefully if the drunken fool could hear him in his sleep, give him some as well.  
  
“Listy,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I missed you. It was so… well, I hate to sound pedantic, it was so bloody boring not having you to shout and sneer at all the time. The more dimensions I found that had a version of you in them… all the different possibilities… it made me homesick.” He reached over and patted Lister’s forearm. It was really the only part of the man he could safely reach without risking waking him. “ **When** I come back, if you try to talk me back into something so ludicrously dangerous I swear I’ll shove a can of your bloody lager where only customs officers dare to poke around.”  
  
He gave the sleeping man one last pat. “Oh Listy,” he said. “I really have missed you, you great big goit.”  
  
Rimmer stood, smoothed out his hologramatic blue shirt and with one last glance at Lister sleeping in the bunk, stepped out of the photograph. Had he waited just a few moments longer to turn off the machine he would have gotten a right laugh watching Lister fall out of bed trying to scratch and claw at his tongue, awakened from some horrible nightmare. But no, Rimmer never saw the nervous breakdown he’d inadvertently caused. He switched off the projector and removed the photograph, ripping it up along with the other two. His work done, he made a note to fling the mutated developing fluid out an air lock or pour it down the loo.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm working on a larger series/fic about Rimmer's time as Ace and how he makes it back to his home dimension as the only Ace to ever actually retire instead of die in the line of duty.
> 
> Because Arnold J. Rimmer always looks out for number 1.
> 
> Drabble is cross-posted to Tumblr.


End file.
